Monday, January 15, 2007

is apple about to change the world again?

jan 15, 2007

i have to admit that the iphone is an 'obscure object of desire', to paraphrase bunuel's exquisite film. a lot of us will be lusting after it.

i have long had multiple devices, a basic cellphone, a palm PDA and a camera. i am beginning to wonder if convergence is worth it, esp as the OS X basis will allow apple to add new personae to the iphone (which may end up, btw, being called apple phone as cisco surely has rights to ''iphone"). oh, darkstorm, i dont think real estate is a big problem for connectivity: everything will be wirelessly connected so you dont need a usb port and a firewire port and all that.

btw, i have found the canon a540 to be a nice camera with a lot of manual controls built in, but it does consume batteries. i guess i'll have to invest in some high-end 2500mAH niMH rechargeable batteries.

2 comments:

The convergence is worth it. BUt wait, I have a 2 megapixel camera and a music player in my phone. The picture quality is not worth it, at the moment. The sound quality isnt so good either. You still would need to maintain separate devices, for now. Maybe in next few years, we will see good cams and mp3 players integrated into phones. But even Sony Eriksson, which carries the best music players and cams, is not upto the mark.

Yes, wireless wont need so much real estate on the phone, true.

But still, I believe phones will complement PCs well, but cannot replace them. I wonder how many times the PC's obituary has been written, but it has survived. Just like radio wrongly wrote the newspaper's obituary. And Oracle wrongly wrote the PCs obituary with its NetPC, Sun wrongly wrote its obituary with Java PC (a computer that ran Applets only).

The phone displays are the biggest problem. Its not comfortable to work with, like a PC. A good compromise would be a normal display unit and keyboard connected wirelessly to your phone, which then becomes your CPU. Well, thats as good as a PC. Just that the box has shrunk a lot.

Rajeev, I dont have much knowledge about cameras, so cannot comment on canon a540.

I also wanted to mention.. I have also noted that a 2 megapixel standalone camera gives better results than the one on a phone. Maybe apart from the megapixel value, there are other parameters that affect picture quality.